Landmine Resistant Robotic Shoes

Need to walk around in a minefield? Then you need to wear the latest
shoe robots. Developed by Franz Konstantin Fuss and other researchers at the
Biomedical Engineering
Research Center of Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, the
robotic
mine-proof shoe can prevent you from stepping on mines. It's
something like strapping a hexapod robot to each of your feet. If one of
the shoe-robot's six legs detect a mine, they hover above the ground,
allowing the other five legs to support your weight. It may sound silly
but these robot shoes could save lives. Land-mines, despite being
outdated devices with little or no miltary value, kill and injure as many
as 20,000 people a year. (There are US and Global campaigns to ban all use of
landmines.) For more details on the robot shoe, see the paper Development
of Novel Anti-Landmine Shoe (PDF format). The paper contains
graphics, photos of the prototype, and a schematic of the metal detector.